Feel free to watch our final visual metaphor video!!! 🙂
DON’T MISS IT!!!👇
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zZC5BZ56RdM4BuVBleK6B-quJnCCbEGo/view?usp=share_link
A. Concept & Story
My visual metaphor project basically depicts the boundary between the depressed real life and the seemingly beautiful dream. I was inspired by a kind of state of mind which sometimes happens to myself as well as people surrounding me. Tired of and paralyzed by the hollow and sometimes depressing life, we try to escape from this reality. But where should we go? At this time, dream may be an option. However, dream itself derives from our life and is the continuation of reality, which means we cannot truly escape. Every day we wake up, we have to again face the reality.
The reason why I want to explore this topic is that it kind of reflects my recent state of mind of being anxious about the reality and life, trying to escape but there’s nowhere to go. But actually the idea was first put forward by my partner Freddie, he was inspired by a Japanese animation called EVA.
B. Creation Process & Execution
When planning, we decided to divide the whole video into three parts: reality, dream and reality. I’ll elaborate respectively on their settings, shootings, sourcing materials and lightings.
- Hollow reality: In this part, we want to illustrate the state of depression and paralysis towards life. Thus, we decided to film some shots like getting lost in the crowd, the contrast between mannequins and real people, the fallen coins (represent the failure after the desire and greed), tearing apart a piece of paper full of the word “lies”, etc. Among them, my favorite shot is the hand with transfusion. It looked really scary, but it is actually the combination of a phone charger and tape. I wanted to express that nowadays, people depended on electronic devices to “continue their life”, further falling into the emotion of depressed and hollowness. We tried to make the lighting darker, so that it can present a more depressing effect. As for the editing process, I added a few sound effects and came up with the “lies” part.
- Dream (bright side): The part is the most beauty and fantasy-like one throughout the whole project. Thus, we wanted to film beautiful scenery and highlight the happiness of people. It was a coincidence that we happened to meet a beautiful sunset on the day we filmed the materials. Moreover, we walked around the cities and shot couples, children and parents, which present love. My favorite part is me holding flowers and wandering on the street. We chose a small road with warm and yellow street lights, enhancing the romantic atmosphere. As for the editing process, I created a reverse transition, split screens technique, speeding up and frame extraction.
- Dream (dark side): This part contains the most challenging shooting process of our whole project. At first, I wanted to film me running and being cornered to despair. However, we found it difficulty to embody the effect we wanted. After multiple tries, we finally decided to change it to me running while Freddie holding the camera and following me, creating a sense of being chased. Moreover, we added a part that the camera quickly zoomed in to my face, and then my eyes. The final result is beyond our expectation. As for the editing process, I altered the color to make it more creepy, and created the broken subtitle.
- Returning to the reality: We wanted to highlight silence at the end. So we made the screen black and white. The previous content had too many twists and information, so I think the final part should be more quiet but meaningful.
C. Collaboration
I’m mainly responsible for acting, voice-over, script writing, video editing (Part 2) and subtitle adding. While my teammate Freddie is responsible for video filming, visual effects, audio editing and decision for background music. I appreciate his talent in aesthetics, and I really enjoy working with him. We basically share idea of how the final result should be like, so we can quickly reach agreements and have great cooperation. Freddie has a good taste in the video effects and aesthetic, and is willing to try out new thing. I’ve definitely learnt a lot from him.
D. Aesthetics & Results
- Reverse transition: I immediately came up with this idea when I thought about the transformation between reality and dream.
- Frame extraction: In order to embody the numbness of the reality, Freddie and I tried to use the frame extraction, inspired by the movies made by Wang Jiawei. Luckily, we reached the effect we wanted, which turned out to be amazing.
- Fuji filter: In the bright side of the dream part, we added the fuji filter in order to make the scene more fantasy-like. The color and the scenery were a match.
- Camera language: We made a lot of close-up and extremely close-up shoots to highlight the anxiety of the girl in the video.
- Voice-over: I invited my friend Makayla to be the voice actress of our video. Thanks to this talented girl, her voices with different layers of emotions added a brilliant touch to our project.
- Color correction: In the first reality part, in order to embody the contrast between mannequins and real people, Freddie added blue, yellow, red and green filters to the split screens.
